41 : In The Real World – 2

“Hmm…”
Friday, at noon.
The official website for『CNP』was updated, announcing information regarding the first official event.
For that reason, I was in the cafeteria, fiddling with my phone to look over the details.

“The first official event is a PvP tournament.”
Exactly as how it was announced in advance, the preliminaries were formatted like a battle royale, while the main competition was in the form of a 1v1 tournament.
In addition, players will be automatically teleported to the event map during the event and the regular map will undergo maintenance and various fixes.
Because of that, if you had items you wanted to bring to the event, or items you didn’t want to lose, it’s best to make sure that they’re kept within the safety area.

“Looks like the event map also consisted of a map for spectating and socializing as well.”
This event also seemingly served as a social gathering for the players.
Players that weren’t participating in PvP could apparently chat and trade items with other players in the spectator/social map.
They also said that there’d be a system where you could register items and it would automatically be exchanged for different items that the admins deemed to be of equal value.
Of course, if you wanted to better yourself without regards to the event, there was another simple map for players who wanted to conduct combat training.
Furthermore, it appears that on the social map, all players would have their amount of abnormalities changed to 3 or less, most likely to prevent PvP and curse concentration deficiency. Players similar to me, whose original avatar had a high number of abnormalities would only have their silhouettes shown.
Incidentally, users without an『CNP』account were able to use a guest avatar to spectate the game which was perhaps to advertise to the public. “Why not invite your real-life friends?” is what was written on the page.
Yeah, no thanks.
Even if it was Zaimichi-san, there’s no way I was going to do that.

“Let’s see, so the layout for the preliminaries…”
Since I’ll probably be able to meet people without any setbacks, I’ll register in some items made from rat corpses and dangling meat fern flowers for trading.
Now for the PvP section…

“…”
First and foremost, the participants in the preliminaries were divided into 16 groups for the battle royale.
You have from today until the day before the event at 24:00 to sign up to participate and you can do that through the in-game settings.
I don’t know how many people will enter overall, but judging by the number of users, the people on the bulletin board estimate at least 1,000 players per group.
Then, each group is relocated to a special map created from an assortment of several terrains (a square with each side being 10km).
Everyone fights until there’s a last man standing and the sole survivor will go on to participate in the main tournament.
Well, no complaints there.

“Still, this is going to be pretty tough.”
The issue was that the curse concentration on the special map was initially set at only 5.
They were also amplifying the time acceleration to 1 hour in real life = 3 hours in the spectator map = 24 hours in the special map. The survival circle was going to shrink every hour and the curse concentration on the special map would increase little by little as well, but there was no real point worrying about any of that since none of them were as problematic as the initial curse concentration.
Other than that, there were a variety of other detailed rules, including ones related to trade goods, but again, they weren’t much of a concern.
After all, if there’s not enough curse concentration in the air, I, Taru, will die within less than a minute.

“Oh, is that so? Taru-san.”
“Ah, Zaimichi-san.”
Zaimichi-san had approached me.
Since she looked as if she was also searching for a seat in the cafeteria, I gestured to the empty one in front of me.

“Will you also be attending the PvP event, Taru-san?”
“Yeah, I was thinking that I’d like to participate if possible.”
The topic of discussion was naturally,『CNP』
It was the source of my troubles, and that’s what Zaimichi-san was asking me about anyways.

“I heard you say it was going to be tough though.”
“If you’re entering, wouldn’t you want to go after the win? But it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll have to crawl through a harsh battle in order to do so.”
“That certainly seems like so. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with just joining and having fun, but if you’re going to contend, you’d definitely want to make the most of it.”
Frankly, there’s a problem that I’d like to solve before all that, but there’s no point in telling Zaimichi-san about it, right?

“By the way, you said ‘also’ earlier, so you’re entering too, Zaimichi-san?”
“Of course, I’ll be participating as well. I don’t know how far I’ll be able to go, but I want to do as much as I can. “
“Fufufu, sounds fun. Though… I’m not sure if I should hope that we get to meet each other in the event.”
“Ah, true. That might indeed be a tricky situation.”
A battle royale format had a considerable amount of uncertainties.
There could be a player with amazing combat abilities, but that player could unexpectedly be defeated if several other players were to focus them. It was possible for a player who only ran away the entire time to last until the very end and win as well.
In Taru’s case, it would be easy to prioritize one on ones and capitalize on unrelated fights, but if a group of players attacked her, she wouldn’t have the leisure to run away which meant she would likely have to be careful about her positioning.

“Oh, which reminds me. I had something to tell you, Taru-san.”
“What is it?”
Zaimichi-san beckoned me over, so I inched closer to her face.
Soon after, she whispered in a small tone.

“Including us, there seems to be 5 or 6 more『CNP』players in our university. I overheard some guys that were apparently talking about it.”
“Really? But…”
“Wouldn’t it be troublesome if someone strange found out you played『CNP』and started following you around because of that? I don’t know what kind of people those guys were either. Since we both have our own privacy, I won’t say who’s a player or who’s not, but if you don’t want to be ousted as a player, remember to take some precautions.”
“Got it. I’ll keep that in mind.”
I mean, it may very well be necessary.
Even if someone asked me to start up a circle with them for『CNP』players, I would still firmly refuse.

“Nevertheless, I hope we can somehow manage to meet up in the spectating and socializing map.”
“Agreed, it might be nice to at least meet up once there.”
After this, we chatted for a while before lunch break ended.
I didn’t bother to take a extended look at the main 1v1 tournament, but it was similar to the preliminaries, with the only difference being the smaller map size as well as the fact that the winner could be determined by decision if time happens to run out.